By the time the "Big Three" were assembled at Yalta in 1945, the British people had for nearly six years been subjected to an intensive hatred propaganda against the Germans, in which the latter had been depicted as the embodiments of everything evil. They were declared to be the sole causes of the war; and not only this war but the previous one and most other ones before that. They were held up to obloquy as leading the way in cruelty, duplicity, a ruthless disregard of civilized conventions, and general turpitude. They had, so it was claimed, started the bombing of open cities,* and in their conduct of the war had thrown legality to the winds. Reference has been made in Chapter 2 to the rampant denunciation of everything Germany handed out to the public by such a highly placed man as Sir Robert Vansittart, whose bitter reproaches could reasonably be taken by the man in the street as being based on full knowledge.
* See also pp. 126, 127.
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Nor had Mr. Churchill been any less vituperative than his diplomatic lieutenant. From the beginning of the war, and more especially since his accession to the Premiership in 1940, he had assailed the Germans with a verbal cannonade of abuse and threats. There was nothing too bad he could say about them. Twice running they had been the criminals who had turned Europe into a slaughterhouse, their present leader was a "bloodthirsty guttersnipe," they themselves must "bleed and burn," and there were "no lengths in violence" to which the British would not go to destroy their wicked power. After years of listening to and reading such sentiments about their principal enemies from their Prime Minister and his host of imitators, the British people had naturally come even before 1945 to regard the Germans as first cousins of the devil. Therefore, for Mr. Churchill to have suddenly come out with an announcement that Britain was dropping out of the war because the Russians and Americans were proposing to treat the Germans too harshly after their defeat, and still more that Britain might join Germany against them, would have struck the British public dumb with a combination of astonishment and horror.
It could not have been done. The population of the British Isles had been worked up by propaganda to a state of passionate hatred of Hitler, the Nazi party, the German Armed Forces, and the German people. They had been told repeatedly that "the only good German was a dead one" and that the unconditional surrender of Germany was the war aim. They could not have tolerated the abrupt abandonment of all these ideas.
Yet their strenuous indoctrination with this hatred of the enemy and the belief that he must be overthrown
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at all costs stood them in very ill stead when one of their allies took or threatened to take a different attitude towards that enemy. If Stalin could give the impression that he might pull out of the fight against Germany, with a fair prospect of being believed, it obviously gave him a decisive advantage over Mr. Churchill if the latter was irrevocably committed to a German defeat. The whip hand in obtaining what he wanted politically would then be with Stalin, and Mr. Churchill would be obliged to dance to the crack of the Russian whip, however damaging to Britain's long-term interests that dance might be. And in so far as Stalin did obtain this whip hand in securing British agreement to post-war conditions which are the main cause of the present dangerous world tension, it was precisely because his object was political and not purely military; because his vision extended beyond victory to the political prizes to be gained therefrom, and was not narrowed and confined to the victory alone. He saw victory, as Clausewitz did, as a means to an end, and not as an end in itself. The evidence is that Mr. Churchill took the latter and more limited view of warfare, and was therefore helpless against Premier Stalin's more long-sighted purposes.
Stalin, of course, had no need to consider public opinion, which became patriotic or lethally deviationist according to how he and his associates of the Politbureau might change their minds. Besides, after 28 years of strict obedience to a ruthless Governmental opportunism enforced by purge and liquidation, Communists in Russia and all over Europe were well-conditioned to drastic reversals of policy, to eating their words, to denouncing a foreign nation as a set of Fascist hyenas one day and hailing them as fellow-workers for
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the Red Paradise the next. For the very reason that British public opinion did not possess this convenient pliability, it was elementary wisdom on the part of British wartime politicians to avoid arousing too much popular passion against the German enemy in case reasons of State should later require that enemy to be regarded more benevolently. But Mr. Churchill went out of his way to excite such passion by every means in his power. Everything in this world has its price; and the price of the hatred propaganda so sedulously disseminated among the British people in the Second World War turned out to be a very heavy one, in the shape of an inflamed rigidity of mind about the Germans that left the British an easy prey to their more calculating Russian allies.
The mass of the British people could not be blamed if they responded to hatred propaganda during the war and believed their political leaders when the latter repeatedly said that the only hope for the world was to bring the Germans to complete and utter defeat. The average man had no reason to mistrust the soundness of such advice. The only other big war of his lifetime had ended with just such a German defeat, followed by a dictated peace; and if there were criticisms of that peace in the inter-war period, the loudest and most persistent of them had been to the effect that the German overthrow had been inadequately brought home to the German people and that the Treaty of Versailles was insufficiently harsh. If, therefore, the British man in the street was told after 1939 that the Second World War was due to too great a leniency on the former occasion, why should he doubt it? He had little or no knowledge of the history of warfare, and was therefore unaware that the great majority of major wars in which England had taken part since
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the Conquest had ended, not in total victory, but in a negotiated compromise peace. In fact, of the fourteen wars that Britain had waged against a white enemy between the days of the Spanish Armada and the German War of 1914, only two, the war against Napoleon and the Boer War, had been carried to complete victory.
Nor, as has already been mentioned in Chapter 2, were any of these fourteen British wars fought against the German "butcher-bird." Nothing of the sort. In the middle seventeenth century, Britain's principal foes were the Dutch. In the late seventeenth century and all through the eighteenth century, the French. Between the overthrow of Napoleon in 18l5 to the end of the nineteenth century, our only active white enemies were the Russians and the Boers.
Historically, moreover, there is nothing permanent about alliances. The warlike grouping of the nations, as might be expected, has been under frequent change, to preserve the balance of power or to snatch the advantages of the moment. Thus, Britain was fighting with France against Holland in 1672, but with Holland against France in 1689; or, again, with Russia against France in 1814, and with France against Russia in 1854- It is, indeed, an historical commonplace that the enemy of one war is the ally of the next.
And sometimes, even, the ally of the same war. In 1793, the Spaniards were on the side of the British against the French. In 1796, they changed over the other way and became the allies of the French against the British. In the next (Napoleonic) war, they did the same thing, but in reverse. Initially allied to the French and thereby sharing in the shattering defeat of Trafalgar, in 1808 they threw in their
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lot with the British against the French and cooperated with Wellington's army in pushing the French out of the Iberian Peninsula.
Russia has a noteworthy record of alternation. In 1798, she joined in the war against the French. Only two years later, she was forming the Armed Neutrality of the North with Sweden and Denmark, directed against Britain. In 1804, after the Peace of Amiens, she participated in the new war against France, but this mood lasted only three years. By 1807, Russia had changed sides again and the Czar had become a warm friend of Napoleon's, concluding secret treaties with him against Britain. By 1818 however, the two Emperors were at loggerheads, and in the following year the Czar was at war with Napoleon. Thus, between 1798 and 18l2, Russia had changed sides no less than four times.
These examples of change of front are not historical curiosities of the past. The twentieth century has seen it happening again. In July 1914, Italy was part of the Triple Alliance, the other members of which were Germany and Austria. In spite of her membership in this alliance, however, Italy did not hesitate to advance a technical excuse for standing aside from the war rather than rushing to help her allies at the outbreak of hostilities. It was not until a year later that she abandoned her neutrality, and entered the war. In favor of her former allies? Not so, but against them. She did the same in 1943 after her capitulation to the Anglo-American invaders of Italy. Again she turned against her German allies. Mr. Churchill apparently saw nothing disgraceful in this reversal of loyalty, but described it as Italy "working her passage" to respectability.
In the summer of 1939, when a conflict between
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Britain and Germany was almost a foregone conclusion, Russia was negotiating with both sides at once for an alliance. She chose the German side, undoubtedly because she saw the greatest advantage to herself in so doing.
Mr. Churchill himself was not averse to a British military volte-face in the case of France. She and Britain had entered the war as allies, pledged to make no separate peace. However, in 1940 France was driven out of the war by the irresistible factor of defeat in the field. Against that compelling argument no accusation of desertion holds good. Force majeure is decisive.
Thereupon, Mr. Churchill sent a naval squadron to demand the surrender of the French ships at Oran (Mers-el-Kebir), failing which they were to be sunk. The surrender was refused, fire was opened, the French battleship Bretagne was blown up, and two others driven ashore, at the cost of 500 French sailors killed. Let the British not deceive themselves into thinking that this was not making war on the French. It fits exactly into Clausewitz's definition of war as "a continuation of policy by other means." The policy was to ensure that the French Oran squadron could in no circumstances be used against the British. It was hoped to arrange for this by negotiations. But when negotiation failed, the "other means" of direct force were employed. This was war.
War was also waged against France in North Africa (the Americans co-operating – being, indeed, in chief command), in the Normandy landing and subsequent operations on French soil, and in the aerial bombings which preceded and accompanied such operations.
It can be argued that the French were longing to be liberated from German occupation and were therefore
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anxious for an anti-German invasion of France. That they wanted an end to the occupation was natural. But whether they wanted it that way is surely more questionable. We shall never know for certain, because the French nation was not asked its views beforehand. I have an idea, however, that had it been invited to vote on liberation by a landing in France or by a landing in, say, Holland or Schleswig-Holstein, there would have been a large majority in favor of one of the latter.
In Britain, at the time, the people were told that the Anglo-American bombings of French factories and other targets were highly popular in France; that the French so much liked having their houses blown to bits and their relatives and neighbors killed that they would run out into the streets and wave enthusiastically to the bombers who had done the damage. I thought these stories, as I read them, indicated an almost superhuman degree of patriotism on the part of the French. Sisley Huddleston, who was in France during the war, discredits any waving there may have been as quite unrepresentative of general feeling.
"The bombing definitely did harm to the Allied cause … one town that I know (in Normandy) had 2,000 inhabitants killed or wounded out of a population of 5,000, and hardly a house was left standing. It is better not to ask the survivors what they think today. Under the official friendship for England and America there is a smoldering sense of injury . . . they (the French) were pained at the idea that there was no way of separating the Germans from the French, and that they were, in fact, if not in intention, lumped together as the enemy to be hurt. . . ."
I, myself, being in a part of Courseulles on the Normandy coast on D + 1 day was cautioned against walking
* "Pétain, Patriot or Traitor?", (Dakers), p. 202.
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alone in the less busy parts of the small town, as the French inhabitants were said to be so vindictive about the manner of their liberation that they were taking any good opportunity of sniping their liberators. To bomb a country, to destroy its factories, to flatten its towns, to kill and injure its citizens is to make war on that country, whether it is done or alleged to be done for the benefit of that country or not. We may have thought we were doing the French a good turn by knocking them and their country about. It is undeniable that we believed we were looking after our own interests at the same time, and it is unlikely that unless we and the Americans had been satisfied on that latter point we should have indulged in any killing of Frenchmen for their own good. The time may come, who knows, when the British may find themselves in a similar position to the French, and after being atom bombed by one side may be atom bombed by the other. Should that happen, I know at least one Englishman who will find it difficult to regard either bombing as the friendly action of a peace-loving well-wisher.
With numerous precedents to support him, and provided he had taken the precaution of keeping public opinion wisely temperate about the enemy, there was no reason why Mr. Churchill need have been squeamish about considering an arrangement with Germany if it was to Brit-ain's benefit to make it. As the Russians had taken that very line in 1939, and were known to have been ready to take it again after 1941, it was no striking display of diplomatic finesse for the British Prime Minister to leave so immensely powerful a means of moral coercion in their hands without making any attempt to counter it in kind. To fail to do so was to make an entirely gratuitous present to the Russians of a bargaining advantage of incalculable
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value. But by 1945 Mr. Churchill could not help himself. He had thrown so much fuel into the furnace of anti-German hatred in the previous war years that the national passion was too fierce to be opposed and Mr. Churchill could only run before the storm of his own creation. But there is no evidence that he had any other desire.
Not that hatred propaganda was an invention of Mr. Churchill's. He was but carrying on the process which, though as old as warfare, had received a tremendous boost in the previous war of 1914-18. In that war, hatred propaganda was for the first time given something like organ
ized attention. The result was a campaign conducted with huge success and almost complete lack of scruple. Any distortion or suppression was practiced if it could help to blacken the en-emy's character. Any atrocity story, whether true or not, was bruited far and wide; and the stories were frequently untrue. The utmost publicity was given to a gruesome report in 1917 that the Germans were boiling down the bodies of their own dead to produce glycerin and other by-products for the manufacture of ammunitions. The story made a deep impression on millions of people in Britain, who were horrified at such ghoulish bestiality and concluded that the Germans were beyond words evil.
The story was a lie. It was a calculated lie, made up with malicious intent on the British side and passed out into circulation with the deliberate purpose of increasing popular passion against the German enemy. After the war, a British Cabinet Minister publicly confessed as much.*
The hatred campaign of the second war was therefore
* The Foreign Secretary in Parliament on Dec. 2, 1925. (See Hansard for that date.)
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only a continuation of the same policy as had been followed in the first, though it was greatly furthered by the availability of new media. By 1939, broadcasting could bring the hiss of verbal detestation, uttered by practiced orators, direct into millions of homes, while the films subtly introduced animus against the enemy into the crowded assemblies of the people's favorite halls of relaxation. The results were all that could be wished by the organizers. Today, eight years after the end of the second German war, there is plenty of evidence that the minds of many of the British are still poisoned by wrath purposely engendered in their wartime hearts against the Germans.
A special cause of British resentment is the memory of the German bombing of London and other cities, immense propaganda capital having been made during the war over the utter German villainy in thus 'starting' the aerial bombing of open towns. It is therefore somewhat startling to read in a book written by an ex-high official of the Air Ministry that not only was it Britain that originated the bombing of civilian targets but that the British should be proud of having done so. To quote the author:
"Because we were doubtful about the psychological effect of propagandist distor-tion of the truth that it was we who started the strategic bombing offensive, we have shrunk from giving our great decision of May 11th, 1940, the publicity it deserves. That surely was a mistake, it was a splendid decision." *
It may or may not have been a splendid decision. What, however, was unquestionably of masterly skill was the accompanying decision that because we were
* Bombing Vindicated by J. M. Spaight, C.B., C.B.E., formerly Principal Assistant Secretary at the Air Ministry (Geoffrey Bles).
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nervous about enemy "distortion" of our initiative in the matter, we would therefore do the distorting ourselves and put the responsibility on to the Germans.
"There was no certainty," says Mr. Spaight, "but there was a reasonable probability that our capital and our industrial centers would not have been attacked if we had continued to refrain from attacking those of Germany."
Therefore, he adds, our British decision to take the lead in such attacks enabled us to "look Kiev, Kharkov, Stalingrad, and Sebastopol in the face." The further question arises, however, whether our strenuous campaign of false propaganda that the Germans had begun the whole dirty business leaves us in a good position to look our former enemy in the face.
That the feeling of the British populace against an enemy could be relatively free of venom is shown by an episode of 1801. For eight years, Britain had been at war with France. The original outbreak had been largely caused by English indignation at the early excesses of the French Revolution, and particularly the Reign of Terror and the execution of the French King and Queen. During the war that followed, British spokesmen had fulminated against French wickedness, cruelty, and moral obliquity quite as fiercely as their successors did against the Germans of a hundred-odd years later.
But these fulminations did not reach the people in the same way that they have done in this twentieth century. In the 1790s there were no cinemas, no broadcasting, and no popular newspapers to influence the mass of the people with inflammatory headlines and leading articles. In the days before national education, the bulk of the people could not read. Hence,
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in those late eighteenth century days the mass mind could only be reached by local word of mouth, which put a severe limit on the extent to which popular opinion could be influenced at all.
The meager scope for propaganda was strikingly shown when the Peace of Amiens was concluded between Britain and France in 1801. For when a French Ambassador returned to England, the London crowd was so delighted to see him arrive as the symbol of restored peace and had been so little affected by the rancor expressed against the French in educated circles that it took the horses out of the shafts of the ambassadorial carriage and dragged it enthusiastically to the Embassy. One simply cannot credit anything of that sort happening to a returning von Ribbentrop's conveyance, in view of the orgy of vilification of his country and countrymen indulged in by the British of 1939-1945, had a compromise peace been made with Germany in the latter year.
It seems a fair assumption, therefore, that if we nowadays get more violently excited against an enemy it is not because we are necessarily more vicious and vindictive than our forebears of a century and a half ago, but because as a nation we are better educated and so succumb more readily to the propagandist. The latter, of course, addresses himself to his task the more zealously where his patients are more responsive to the treatment; and is encouraged in his efforts by the politicians, presumably because they believe that hatred helps the war effort. Superficially, no doubt it does. But a more measured view may suggest that the deliberate injection of hatred into the general population is as dangerous as an addiction to drugs on the part of the
individual in creating a psychological craving for continued indulgence and a morbid rejection of all
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moderating influences that might stand in the way; resulting in a war policy determined more by insensate emotion than by cool-headed and practical judgment. It was in keeping with the induced detestation of the chief enemy with which, as never before, the Britain of the Second World War was pulsating, that her leader's war aims were ultra-extremist and entirely scornful of the principle favored by the Russian and Austrian Emperors in their struggle against Napoleon in 1813, that "the way should never be closed against peaceful tendencies even in the hottest fight." Unconditional surrender was a war policy from which every drop of moderation had been squeezed, and in which the scientific use of calculated restraint could have no place.
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